Moonlighting at Noon? E-Commerce Survey Seems to Indicate

Are a growing number of your employees working a second job, right under the boss’s nose?

That may well be the case, according to a recent survey of users by the e-commerce platform Bigcommerce.com.

Bigcommerce.com surveyed 20,000 of its online U.S. stores to determine when most store owners were working on their sites. What they found raised suspicions that lots of store owners have full time jobs, and are pursuing their entrepreneurial itch on company time.

The main discovery, Bigcommerce reports, is that a large and growing percentage of online store activity occurred at night — between 6 p.m. and 8 a.m. Not much chance those folks are working for themselves while on someone else’s clock.

But looking further, Bigcommerce said, it found that nearly 80% of online retailers were hard at it at noon. At 3 p.m., about 50% were working online.

“The data paints a new picture of the modern-day entrepreneur,” said Eddie Machaalani, co-founder and co-CEO of Bigcommerce. “Through daily conversations with our clients and monitoring this trend over recent years, we understand that many of these small business owners are pulling long hours to run their business and work a full- or part-time job on top of that, but these numbers provide us with hard stats and evidence.”

Other data from the survey pinpointed what part of the country hosts the most "moonlighters":

33% — the largest group of moonlighters — are based in Southern states (with Florida, Georgia and Texas having the highest concentration in the region).

27% are based on the West Coast (led by Arizona, Colorado and California).

24% of U.S. moonlighters are located on the Northeast (led by New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C.).

15% are located in the Midwest (led by Michigan, Illinois and Ohio).

This article was originally posted at BenefitsPro.com, a sister site of Credit Union Times.